Just 10 minutes to create a free gemstone server in the cloud

Amazon offers a free one-year miniature instance product that caught my attention:

To help new customers of AWS (Amazon Web Services) get started in the cloud, AWS introduces a brand new, free to use level. Starting November 1, new AWS customers can use Amazon EC2 Micro instance for free for a year ...

But is a miniature instance sufficient to run a seaside application in gemstone? The answer is: YES. In fact, I've tried to create an already configured gemstone EC2 Linux AMI (Amazon Machine Image). In this article, I'll tell you how to use this already configured image to deploy the seaside application to EC2 (elastic Compute Cloud) quickly and free.

(For the Gemstone EC2 Linux ami creation process, refer to this blog post: http://www.nickager.com/nasite/blog/Installing-Gemstone-on-an-Amazon-EC2-Linux-instance)

Note: These instructions are based on connecting to an Amazon EC2 instance from a OS client, and these instructions apply to other UNIX clients as well. For a Windows client, you may need to download:

PuTTY

Cygwin

and modify these instructions accordingly.

Create a EC2 instance

First to http://aws.amazon.com registration. After landing you can navigate to the following interface:

* Pull up and down in the "Region" combo box and select the area closest to you.

* Click on the "Launch Instance" button to open the request Instance Wizard

Select the Community Ami tab and enter "ami-7f9bae0b" in the search box, which is the AMI (Amazon Machine Image) ID of the Gemstone/seaside instance that is already configured. In a previous blog post, I have documented the configuration process for this image, and I can refer to the links given earlier in this article.

Note: After recording this screenshot, I realized that "ami-7f9bae0b" can only be used in the "Eu-west" area, and Amazon did not copy it directly to other areas. In the next few days, I will try to make it available in the "US" area, before you can find the AMI only by setting your area to "eu-west".

If you want to use the free product offered by Amazon, you can choose "Micro". Amazon's description of the miniature example is as follows:

Examples of this series can continue to provide you with a small amount of CPU resources, and you can increase CPU resources when other cycles are available. They are better suited for low throughput applications and Web sites that periodically consume computing cycles.

Next, we enter an RSA public key for this EC2 instance to support SSH access. The key is generated using the "Ssh-keygen" command:

$ ssh-keygen-t RSA


generating public/private RSA key pair.


Enter file in abound to save the key (/USERS/NICKAGER/.SSH/ID_RSA):


Enter Passphrase (empty for no passphrase):


Enter Mahouve Passphrase Recycle:


Your identification super-delegates been saved.


Your public key super-delegates been saved in/users/nickager/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.

Then, use the "~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub" command to extract your public key, and enter it into the "User Data" field of this instance in the following format

#cloud-config


Ssh_authorized_keys:


-Ssh-rsa aaaab3nzac1y ...


disable_ec2_metadata:true

Format: cloudinit (Syntax)

No key/value pairs need to be entered

Because we have entered an SSH key into the User Data field in the previous step, there is no need to specify a key pair again:

Configure the firewall to open Port 22 (SSH) and 80 port (HTTP):

Finally, click on the "Launch" button to wait for this instance to start:

If this instance is started, copy the URL of this instance (public DNS):

Point your browser to your server's public DNS address (for example: http://ec2-46-51-165-46.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com), and then you should be able to see the familiar seaside Welcome screen:

Congratulations to you! You've got your own, free seaside server running in Amazon EC2.

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